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In regards to yesterday’s post wherein I “defended” those “lazy Americans”. A couple of people jumped in and reacted as though I really was boiling with rage. The post was intended with a light-hearted tone. I thought that came through pretty clearly in the original post, but in case it didn’t: I wasn’t upset in the least, and I’m still not. I wasn’t REALLY offended by anything. I saw a couple of comments along the lines of “lazy Americans” and I had some fun with them.

(Actually, now that I’m re-reading it, I think the second to last sentence – the one in italics – does sound pissed off. My bad. I’m not really upset with anyone, not even the people who DID imply the “Lazy Americans” stuff. Really, it was a fun discussion about socks.)

This is another reason I’d like to get back to a small-audience blog. I’m just not very good at big-audience stuff. I like writing rants. I probably like writing them more than anything else. But sometimes I mess up, or people missunderstand the joke or miss the humor entirely, and with a big audience this causes more angst and hurt feelings. I’m not going to pepper my rants with smileys or add a “I’m just having fun with you” disclaimer at the end. I’d rather just not post them at all.

Although, maybe this will be self-balancing: If I piss off enough people my audience will dwindle down to a size I can handle.

Shamus, don’t worry about people misunderstanding you. It’s honestly not worth it to try to reconcile most of the time. This applies only to the internet; in real life, with real friends, always try to reconcile.

Dunno. It sounded more like bored exasperation to me, but I could be projecting. I have the same reaction to overgeneralizing opinions whether it’s “lazy Americans” or “French” (hmmm, no modifier there. What does THAT say?) or “Stupid Polacks”.

I happen to be all three, so such silliness holds pretty much no serious ability to raise my ire at all.

Um, if you don’t mind a semi-serious post, I read an article a while ago that indicated people did no better than random when trying to detect tone in emails and forum posts, but that 90% of the people tested believed they could tell what the tone was 90% of the time!

It can be very hard to pick up sarcasm from text unless it is extremely obvious. Filing it under “Rants: Frowning and scowling at things” doesn’t help though. Perhaps you should have filed it under “Rants: Wry smiles and the poking of gentle fun”. ;P

I think you’re right to want a smaller blog. If you notice, most e-celebrities learned a long time ago that mixing their personal blogs with their fame-inducing ones can be catastrophic. It looks like you’re learning the same thing.

I support you fully in dividing the content, and I actually enjoy your blog posts as much (if not better) than your comics. But then I discovered your blog hours before I discovered your comic. You hooked me with your transcribed D&D campaign. I’m attempting a lite version of that right now.

*shrugs* It’s a problem with conveying information by text only – human communication is mostly interpreted through inflection and body language, but that’s always missing in text. It wasn’t so much your remarks, Shamus, that got me to the point of saying ‘enough already’, but more the comments by others who were happily joining in the growing hate-mongering. Maybe they were supposed to be ‘joking’ too… but some of them sure didn’t come across that way.

I would have thought that your censure would have been better served against the hate-mongerers rather than against someone saying ‘enough’, but hey, it’s your blog.

I am taking a liberty to assume that your bladderless bile delivery system is functioning well. That is, unless you wanted to cheer yourself up from your deathbed with the sock discussion. But I prefer the opposite interpretation.

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